Bellini’s Norma Monday evening didn’t at all improve on the production it was replacing.
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
Beaumarchais clearly delighted in this unobtrusive realm.
The Met ushers out this wretched year and rings in the new with an elegant and effective new production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
Bartlett Sher’s “new to Chicago” production of Romeo et Juliette came to the Lyric Opera at Monday’s opening after appearances at Salzburg and Milan.
Sir Richard Eyre’s new Manon Lescaut at the Met Friday night demonstrated no particular aptitude for opera.
While the celebrity-studded, expensively-dressed audience gathered for the gala opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2015-2016 season seemed genuinely enthralled by Monday evening’s performance of Otello, it was more likely swept away by the power of Verdi’s genius than by Bartlett Sher’s puzzling, inert new production.
Vittorio Grigolo in the title role of the Met’s revival of Les Contes d’Hoffman is the opera version of the charming homeless drunk.
This afternoon at the Met, Grigolo sold his performance like the rent was due tomorrow and he was down to his last penny.
If Frank Castorf‘s work on Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth accomplishes nothing else, it should serve as a sort of loud disorganized reminder of the dangers of indulging in the intentional fallacy.
“I literally wanted to punch Sher in the face.”
UPDATE: A video preview of the new Elisir follows the jump.
The ENO was filled with ghosts last week. Spectral, possibly illusory figures fleetingly materialized in the Internet chatrooms that provide the setting for much of Nico Muhly’s new opera Two Boys, and brutal boarding school memories came back to troubled life in director Christopher Alden’s dark take on Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Volpe, who is 69, wants to set the record straight, now that Peter Gelb is being held up as the architect of a new, dynamic Met: with enough money, he too could have been creative. ‘Peter spends money in ways I never could,’ Volpe told me. ‘If I had Mercedes Bass and I could have…
Our own Gualtier told tales and named names, in great detail, after Monday’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann dress rehearsal. Squirrel was at the premiere, and had a grand old time. Bartlett Sher‘s production lovingly displays the many dimensions of Offenbach’s inspired and charming opera. With perfect comedic timing, clarity of action, and real depth of feeling, even its few…
So, I was asking my friends with Met Opera insider connections about the new Hoffmann production directed by Bartlett Sher. Seemingly conceived under an unlucky star, this production first lost two of its four heroines when Anna Netrebko decided not sing Olympia and Giulietta but kept Antonia and also Stella, leaving the dramaturgy somewhat lopsided.
The Met’s new production of Janacek’s From the House of the Dead sets high standards for the company, but as an indicator of the Gelb Era, it may be too good to be true.
La Cieca sat in on the “Cognitive Theater” discussion tonight at the New York Public Library, and the main impression she came away with is that Patrice Chéreau is a very quiet, soft-spoken man who happens to be a genius. (She was expecting something more fiery, but like many of the great divas, it seems…
La Cieca thanks a particularly loyal member of the cher public for pointing out the most recent bit of hard-hitting arts coverage in the Wall Street Journal, as copied and pasted by that hardest of all arts hitters, Terry Teachout. La Cieca says “copied and pasted” because in this piece Teachout manages to blather on…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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